The major Hollywood producers offer only 8% of their films in Catalan

The Platform for the Language, in occasion of the celebration of the 2015 Oscars, has launched a new video to raise awareness of the marginalization suffered by the Catalan language by the major Hollywood producers. Only an 8% of the 262 films released by the subsidiaries of the 6 major American production and distribution studios (the so called major) in Spain were in Catalan.

Of those six (Warner Bros, Columbia, 20th Century Fox, Universal Pictures, Walt Disney and Paramount), Fox is the one that has offered less versions in Catalan, reported to the films released, only 3%; the next ones are Universal and Walt Disney, both with around 5% versions in Catalan. Instead, Colombia is the largest that has theatre releases in Catalan, 17% of total, followed by Paramount, with 15%. Warner, farthest of these percentages, released only 9% of the films in Catalan. Those are results that Platform for the Language analysed from the latest official data, 2012, from the website of the Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports and the Catalan website of the Government of Catalonia.The Platform for the Language also warns that the possibilities of the viewers of watching these films in theatres are reduces even further because they make few copies (analogue and digital), they’re passed on a few venues and with a very low diffusion compared to the one of the Spanish version of these releases.

The Platform for the Language, through this new video, wants to denounce the anomaly in the situation of the Catalan cinema. An unusual and unique situation in the world, because all language communities comparable to Catalan (with a similar or lower number of speaker) have more commercial films translated in their official languages. A situation the organization is reporting for many years.The Catalan NGO asks the major Hollywood producers to stop treating the Catalan audience as unimportant viewers and asks the same respect as other communities as Quebec (which mostly have a dubbed version specific and different version of the French version in France), Swedish of Danish.The Platform for the Language invites all the viewers to mobilize through the web elcatalaalcinema.cat, where they can find more information, to demand the upcoming releases in Catalan, and also more copies in Catalan, so they can arrive to all the Catalan municipalities of all the Catalan speaking territories.